Author: John Robertson

One way to resurrect a struggling franchise is to bring in a new development team. All the better if said team has the kind of status that helps fans forgive past mistakes. Capcom did it when it gave control of Devil May Cry to Ninja Theory, and now Square Enix is hoping for similar success by giving Nier Automata to Platinum Games.

2010's Nier wasn't, by any measure, a success. A mixed critical reception was followed by sub-par sales and boxed copies filling bargain bins. By combining so many complex elements in an action RPG, Nier was far too convoluted and confusing to be fun. It was a game that was less than the sum of its parts, albeit one with a passable story in comparison to other examples in the genre.

Bringing in Platinum Games should immediately enhance two areas: combat—which the studio is famously brilliant at—and audience interest. After all, saying there's a sequel to a half-arsed action RPG is one thing. Saying there's a new game from the creators of Bayonetta, Vanquish, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is quite another. Having played Nier Automata, I can confirm that the game bears Platinum Games' trademark over-the-top combat—and the fact that I'm writing about it hints that there's audience interest. Job done, then? Well, maybe.

What's impressive about Dawn of War III is how beautifully it manages to communicate the weight, scale, and ferocity of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. From the severe, decaying landscape of its maps, to the radical conservatism of prominent factions and technology that carries a distinctly Gothic edge, no other game based on a Games Workshop IP manages to deliver such a morosely charming combination of grief, rage, and fanaticism.

Given that this is developer Relic's third game in the series you'd expect the design team to have nailed the aesthetic by now, but the visuals are especially striking. Which is not to say that Dawn of War III's charms are entirely superficial. It combines the best bits from the first two Dawn of War games: the dominant, powerful hero units of the second, and the larger armies and strong emphasis on base building and expansion of the original.

I've played just one single-player map—as Blood Raven Space Marines facing off against Eldar—but the relationship between managing the scale of an army and efficiently using each hero's special skills feels perfectly pitched to satisfy fans of the series. Base building and the training of units is simple enough that you're not forced into micromanaging everything, leaving you plenty of time to concentrate on the more exciting task of using hero abilities.

COLOGNE, Germany—With shooters trending towards the modern or futuristic—see the likes of Titanfall and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare—Battlefield 1 and its exaggerated take on the First World War is something of an anomaly. And yet, when it was unveiled in May, the first Battlefield 1 trailer became one of the most viewed and liked game trailers of all time. Who says old military technology would make for a less interesting game, eh?

More so than any other game in the series, Battlefield 1 has the potential to capture the spirit of much-loved games like Battlefield 1942 and the original Call of Duty, which were both set in WW2. Replacing guided missiles and thermal scopes with bolt-action rifles and bayonets forces you to play keener attention to the environment and, crucially, learn how to master the basics of your weapon instead of relying on gadgetry. The fundamental principles of staying alive in a war zone—checking all of your corners, keeping track of allies, only crossing an open-space when it's safe, and making best possible use of vehicles—are brought to the fore.

"I think that the response we've had so far is that people seem to like the fact that it is an analogue battlefield that we're presenting and that there's less high-tech equipment," explains Lars Gustavsson, Battlefield 1 design director. "Here we've brought in shorter engagement distances deliberately in order to expand the diversity of viable tactics, so it becomes a more accessible experience…Our analogy has been that if Battlefield 4 was Formula 1 then this is more like a rally championship. Both are great and highly competitive sports, but they work under different circumstances. There are more details in Formula 1, but rally is more brutal."

COLOGNE, Germany—When you're a child, everything is terrifying. Shadows under the bed hide monsters, the light peeking through the window creating a world of stark whites and blacks. Tarsier Studios' Little Nightmares (formally known as Hunger) brings you straight back to this world, filling you with that inflated sense of wonder and horror only a child can feel. It's impressive stuff.

Boil it down and Little Nightmares is a simple platformer with stealth elements and puzzle solving. In a short Gamescom demo, I traversed an area, trying not to be seen by an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, while also figuring out how to gain enough platforming height to reach an elevated air vent. Philosophically and artistically, though, it's so much more.

"Even though we've got this solid core of a game idea, everyone in the studio has a different take on what’s going on," explains senior narrative director Dave Merkiv. "It would depend on who you talk to as to what the game means, but for me I see the cruelty of being a vulnerable kid caught in the middle of absolute grotesquery and trapped within these things that don't make sense."

COLOGNE, Germany—Both developer Streum On Studio and publisher Focus Home Interactive seem unwilling to define it as such, but Space Hulk: Deathwing is essentially an old-school dungeon crawler masquerading as a first-person shooter. The basic setup is that your four-player squad, consisting of either human players or AI, battle through enormous space stations made up of various rooms, corridors, and doors that can be blocked off or opened up.

The layout of the Space Hulk (read: dilapidated star ship) highlights just how dungeon-like the level design goals are, particularly the overhead map I'm shown during the Gamescom 2016 demo. Pathways bleed into each other to create circuit board-like channels of parallel and intersecting right angles, while rooms have multiple entry and exit points to defend or exploit. Things get very confusing very quickly. Your location goal is indicated on the map, but how you get there is down to you.

As per the tabletop game that shares the Space Hulk name, and from which Deathwing takes its inspiration, the ceaselessly energetic Genestealers (a predatory alien species) pursue you without pause. Their presence both forces your squad of Deathwing Space Marines to keep moving, and prevents you from recklessly pushing forwards. They are reason and fear combined into one.

COLOGNE, Germany—Changing the formula of a respected, successful franchise is a risky business, and first impressions of Gears of War 4's DeeBees highlight the problem. This new robotic race of enemies, seemingly named by the director of a children's television show, flank and shoot like the Locust we're used to, but the aesthetic difference is difficult to warm to. Shooting and killing sentient boxes of circuit boards and wires doesn't provide that same sense of guttural, crass satisfaction that comes with blasting a hole through the head of a Locust (which appear in other parts of the game), or ripping a chainsaw through its torso. Call me an animal, but that's what I want from Gears of War, the quintessential third-person cover-based shooter. Dismembering an android incarnation of The Rock doesn't provide that same splat and release.

Having seen just 20 or so minutes of them in action, maybe that's an unfair judgement. After all, DeeBees come in various forms, so there's the potential for them to change tactics and develop their own unique personality amongst their fleshier brethren. Bipedal DeeBees, for instance, forego the use of cover, instead relying on their armour to deflect your rounds, while the power of their weapons deters you from poking your head out of cover to get a shot off. They can jump low when navigating over cover, and if they get close they turn suicide bomber and explode.

The smaller of the two walkers I saw tended to attack only in packs, their role seemingly focused on herding you into tight spots from which their larger siblings could deal the real damage and force you into a compromising position. It's these larger examples, which pack more potent weapons, that blow up in your face. If you're too close to them when they jump over cover you become stunned for a moment, which is enough time for them to blow up and take you out. Additionally, flying drones and fast, ground-based mechanised balls that roll up to you and, again, explode in your face, act as support robots and distractions.

"No Gods or Kings, Only Man." No higher authority than that of reason and rationality. A place where "the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small." As videogame intros go, few are as ambitious, or as forthright, as the protagonist's descent into the murky depths that envelop Bioshock's underwater city of Rapture. Fewer still are as effective nearly a decade on. Whether players realise it or not, those words—No Gods or Kings, Only Man—plastered above the golden visage of the game's big bad, Andrew Ryan (an interesting contradiction in itself), set a tone that's carried through the entirety of the game.

It's a mighty ambitious tone too. Objectivism—a controversial political philosophy created by the Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century—is what stands between Bioshock having a hokey sci-fi plot, and one that gives it worth well beyond its now-waning technical offerings. What is objectivism? In short, it's the idea that society flourishes if each of its members focuses on their own self-interests over the interests of others, and without heavy-handed intervention from the state. In doing so, the theory runs that each person creates a personal situation where they feel accomplished and happy. Ultimately, society rules itself, "without Gods or Kings."

Objectivism in Bioshock is seemingly presented as a failure. When you arrive in Rapture, the city has already fallen into chaos and decay, the vast majority of its surviving inhabitants having been consumed by the gene-altering "plasmids" that instil both superpowers and insanity on its users. But the real message of the game goes deeper than this simple warning. Rapture's founder and ruler, Andrew Ryan, is Bioshock's less-than-subtle embodiment of Ayn Rand. Both Rand and Ryan grew up in the Soviet Union under strict communist governments, experiencing the kind of poverty and injustice that sometimes results from a system where individual liberty is side-lined in favour of helping the whole.

Recently I watched The Pagemaster, a movie from the 1990s that I hadn't seen since I was 12 years old. It starred Macaulay Culkin, who was then riding on a wave of publicity following his success as Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. As a kid, I loved The Pagemaster, watching it in those spare time moments between playing Command & Conquer and trying in vain to be the next Jurgen Klinsmann. Unfortunately, as is usually the case when revisiting something from your youth: The Pagemaster is not as good as I remembered it.

So too is Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival, a modern version of a classic top-down football game that's built for speed and tactics over the flashy visuals of something like FIFA. Or at least, that's what they (developer Dino Dini) want you to think. In a very real sense, Kick Off Revival is even harder to swallow than a modern viewing of The Pagemaster, developed as it has been without any concessions at all to the modern gaming audience. Hugely questionable visual tweaks and glitches aside, Kick Off Revival plays almost exactly like the original 1989 Amiga and Atari Kick Off game.

Dino Dini's staunch dedication to recreating Kick Off's original play style can be either be seen as an act of supreme naivety, or one of narcissism as he makes an ill-fated attempt to suggest that his 27-year-old design has a place amongst modern football offerings. Both could well be true.

You know what a King game looks like by now. Despite the broad array of fantastical names and exotic themes, each one is, at its core, a match-three game in which blocks are switched to create lines of uniform colours. It's not a new concept and King certainly didn't invent it, but the young Swedish company has undoubtedly acquired more success from the formula than anyone else on mobile devices.

Through the first quarter of 2016, King has had three titles in the top 15 grossing games on the Apple App Store and Google Play in the US. Candy Crush Saga is arguably the most famous and most played mobile game ever released, and that orange and yellow logo is synonymous with gaming on the go. It's this success that resulted in the studio recently being acquired by Activision-Blizzard for a rather princely sum, despite concerns that it's nothing more than a flash-in-the-pan, one trick pony. Its IPO back in 2014 was a disaster, after all.

Indeed, the company has struggled to bestow the enormous success of Candy Crush upon its other products. With so many people still swiping digital blocks of sugar to pass the time, and with King's line-up being so mechanically uniform, why would players deviate towards another IP? The likes of Pet Rescue Saga, Diamond Digger Saga, and Alpha Betty Saga have been but mere farts in the wind compared to the freemium, money-ranking behemoth that is Candy Crush.

Can machines think? This is the question posed by Alan Turing's 1950 paper, Computer Machinery and Intelligence. Turing believed that by the year 2000, our understanding of computers would have evolved to the point where machines could think, work out problems, and be able to imitate a human. As of today, Turing's predictions might not have all come true, but humans are sometimes duped in small ways every day, not least through the many online chat and help bots that make you think you're talking to a human.

What does it mean to be human in a world in which machines can imitate humans? Where does the human component begin and end? What does the human component even consist of? Bulkhead Interactive's The Turing Test explores these questions.

At its core, The Turing Test is a first-person puzzle game in which you explore a research base on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The puzzles are supposedly designed in such a way so as to make them impossible for a computer to solve. Only a human mind can unlock the puzzles, thus setting up a potential answer for the riddle of what it means to be human.